Like most political news junkies north of the 49th I’ve been following the American presidential race with eager fascination, a despondent and slightly abject fascination. Being confined as I am as a Canadian, to be a spectator in what will be, regardless of out come, the most profound decision in democratic politics of my (sliver of) adulthood, is frustrating. However, it does leave me in a reasonably good position to analyze the race with, perhaps, a greater degree of equanimity.

My first observation is that the power of rhetoric, particularly extended exposition, in this race is unparalled in my (admittedly limited) recollection of any political race. It gives me great hope that the power of the sound bite is being quashed by proper speeches and exposition and I can’t help but attribute that to technology - YouTube in particular, which allows people to consume lengthy discourse at their convenience. Speeches like Obama’s Race Speech would’ve been seen only by those few who tuned in, the rest would be forced to draw conclusions from the largely vacuous punditry that followed.

While I’m sure there are more original, and more accurate epithets for the kind of simplistic and ignorance promoting politics that we’ve seen in the last few cycles I dub it check list politics. It is, it seems, not merely a campaign style - it is a methodology of framing issues as an aggregation of soundbites and terminology. It is not merely using reductivist language like “cut and run” but it is the reciprocal process of reductivist thinking that the rhetoric triggers. That issues, and politicians’ stances on them should, or indeed must be condensed to binary support or opposition. It is the same thinking and methodology that triggers the kind of purile and reprehensible banter seen on shows like “Crossfire.” It’s no coincidence that the grand master at this methodology, James Carville, was co-host of the show for three years.

It is worth mentioning, for those that aren’t political nerds, that James Carville is the architect of the first Clinton administration’s campaign; I point this out to indicate that the conception of American’s as reactionist, ignorant and simplistic crosses party lines, predates Bush and is extraordinarily effective. James “God” Carville is regarded very highly amongst campaign operatives.

Checklist politics, that is the strategy of message, discourse, rhetoric even selections of leaders serve the mandate given by a statistical outlay of electorate preference. It is the “tokenization”, as in “token black man,” of everything. It is the view of political stance and agenda not as a systemic framework to tackle perceived existing problems and absorb and react to unforseen issues and unintended consequences, but as a grocery list of “To Do’s.” As if going to the white house was a shopping trip.

This distorted view of public responsibility, of democracy as teaching and convincing not as informing and leading, is as pervasive as it is disgusting. It is, unfortunately, very effective. Which is why the Obama candidacy, and his game-changing presence, gives me a Canadian with indirect and extraordinarily complicated ties to America’s fate hope. The potential this holds for Canada cannot be ignored. I hope, and believe Canadians are watching the United States and are beginning to question where that kind of discourse can be found in our country. Where can we find our audacity to hope?

I have heard it said by many that Canadians aren’t as illcontent as Americans, that Harper and Martin aren’t like Bush II. My response to that is similar to Obama’s response to animosity over Bush, hating Bush and voting premised on that hate misses the point. Just as hating Harper misses the point and the problem. The problem exists and can be seen in a system where someone who seeks to unravel the popular work of several Prime Ministers before him, men greater and smarter than he is can be elected and stay in office. Where the opposition, in a place of rightness, in a place of legitimacy when it is the best interests of the country to intervene is cowed.

Where cynicism, distrust and disgust cloud the views of the electorate who feel, nearly universally, disengaged and excluded. Who feel that it is too expensive, too difficult and too ineffective to make political change.

I want to vote for someone in whom I can believe. I cannot abide a system where I have to select a candidate based on how relatively nausiated I feel about them. I cannot abide a system where political strategy suprecedes principle. Where a leader is afraid to expose their ineptitude and so backs away from their principles.

The disgust with electoral politics is the same, and even if it isn’t the causes and problems with it are the same. Our working are poor, our educated immigrants aren’t using the education that got them here in the first place, our international moral leadership (a very fragile thing to begin with) is decaying, our indigenous people are marginalized and our corporations get a free ride on the labour of Canadians.

As someone who loves my country, who threw away his life as he knew it to pursue a future dedicated to its betterment by serving the people around me; I know there is something better here, I know we’ve got better minds and better voices; I’ve heard them, I’ve debated with them and I’ve been taught by them. Altruism needs to come back, hope, responsibility and a sense of gratitude to the voting population needs to come back. Now.

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My youngest sister, mother to my nephew, is pretty dedicated to consumer responsibility - she wants to make informed choices about the products she buys. She wants to support businesses that are responsible and ethical. This is a horrendously complicated process - there are so many variables to consider and there’s the implicit prioritization of certain problems. A company who uses organic fibres might have them manufactured by sweat-shop labour. A company that produces reusable containers might dump toxic chemicals used in manufacturing into the waterways. How does a consumer stay abreast of these things?

Just as importantly, how do you incent corporations to become responsible by rewarding them for good behaviour. Organizations, more than any other system is are susceptible to operant conditioning, and all the rules apply. Thus you must, as a customer find a way of connecting your business with corporate responsibility. You need a way to tell Second Cup or Starbucks or whomever, that you’re buying that coffee at least in part because you support corporate responsibility.

My idea would be to construct a non-profit organization that releases a loyalty card. This non-profit would research businesses, discover those that are responsible organizations and negotiate a membership listing wherein member organizations can implement loyalty programs like discounts, reward points etc using this single, unified card. This would allow smaller businesses to start a loyalty program, it would interface cleanly with existing loyalty programs of established firms and the customer would have a card that’s usable in mutliple businesses (instead of a separate card for each one).

It would have an architecture similar to Air Miles or the SPC (Students Price Club) except it would be a non-profit agency.

Moreover, if the the user base of this card grows large enough, the organization can use company’s desires to compete as bargaining chips in enforcing greater responsibility. “You want to add X loyalty points per purchase, this will probably bring you X dollars in profits? Fine, make these alterations which will cost you 0.1X.”

Then it becomes a race to the top rather than a race to the bottom.

Obviously this would need some rather substantial angel investment to get off the ground - multi-millions of dollars. But by saving the customer a lot of work and providing a transparent, non-profit organization that is subject to review from other orgs you could create a checks and balance system that, although not perfect, would alleviate a lot of the guilt burden customers feel when they purchased based solely on price.

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As part of a group assignment in my Political Science 108 class we were tasked with doing a group presentation. The time constraints on the presentation relative to the quantity of time given to do the project is a bit skewed - 25 minutes for 4 - 6 people to review what they did over 5 months.

Taking it as a challenge to compress the information I learned over the time period into as small an envelope as possible I created and recorded my component of the presentation. The team effort is to articulate four aspects of Mozilla; it’s history, it’s organizational structure, its context and finally future prospects.

I gave myself the section focusing on the context of Mozilla and decided to show Mozilla’s value net because I believe it hightlights many of the aspects of Mozilla that set it apart from other organisations.

You can view the video online via my new Blip TV account right here.

It’s some parts L. Lessig, some parts Ben Croshaw and other parts Terry Gilliam…hopefully informative and entertaining.

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It is becoming abundantly clear that universities, or at least MY university prefers insulated well aligned education patterns where one picks a trajectory and propels along that vector. Indecision, which is viewed as the desire for a broad scope of education and learning, is probably the worst attribute a student can have. Being ignorant of the world outside your domain is competitively adaptive - you’re more tightly focused on your specialization.

Obviously this is news to nobody - the very division of arts from sciences, and the subdivisions with those groups has been around for ages, and everyone knows it sucks - but everyone keeps doing it anyway.

My situation is especially frustrating I’m studying international relations and peace and conflict, or at least hope to. I’m interested in investigating the role of information and technology on the decision making processes in conflict situations - essentially asking “Does conflict arise from a certain kind of information blindness?”

Optimally I would study cognitive science to look at individuals and how they use information to make decisions. I would look at communications studies and linguistics to see how communication of information can affect people’s cognition and distort the conclusions they make. I would study psychology to see how information forms biases, how language forms biases and how bias influences both decisions and the decision making process.

I would look at organizational behaviour, social pyschology and sociology to see how individual decision making and information sharing processes affect groups and how groups interact with each other.

I would probably want to look at cybernetic theory to investigate decision systems, organizational systems and judicial systems for analysis of formal decision making processes and as a method of modelling information processes.

I would look at the economics of information valuation, and the affects of valuation on decision making. The influences of information completeness on the economics of choice, for example.

That’s just the positive aspects of the study. The normative aspects would entail software design and programming, interaction design, computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, bayesian statistics, game theory.

All of these subjects contribute to the frame work of analysis, all of these subjects are taught in courses at various levels at U of T. I will study maybe 3 of them, for no reason other than departmental boundaries and the necessity for “crisp” curriculum coherence.

I have a lot of skills and knowledge which SHOULD be useful to my studies but unless I inject them into my studies artificially, there is no impetus to bring them to the table - in fact they could be considered a liability if they aren’t shared by the professor or TA grading my work. There is a critical weakness in universities assuming undergraduate students know nothing - because they inevitably feel the obligation to live up to expectations.

I doubt I am unique in my quandry, which makes me wonder what expertise is floating around my class rooms that I will never see or know about.

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Stories like this one are thrilling to read about as an open source enthusiast. However, I can’t help but feel a little embarrassed on behalf of my alma mater - the venerable University of Toronto. Obviously, Seneca has sheer numbers working in its favour - with something like 100,000 students there’s bound to be someone willing to make open source a part of the college community. University of Toronto, however has at best awkward , indirect and abortive efforts to show for itself.

That said, I attended the Free and Open Software Symposium at Seneca@York and was thoroughly impressed and discouraged in turn. Firstly, I was impressed by the calibre of the attendees and the relatively low barrier to interaction with what are normally inaccessible people. Though a handful of these people decided to establish their own barriers to interaction. I discouraged by the relatively low student presence felt there - maybe a dozen or two students made an appearance. With at least 300,000 in the GTA alone, this is hardly what I was expecting.

Universities, particularly students, have a strong incentive to promote open source within their institutions. Their fees go to paying software licensing. Every Dell workstation running a copy of Novell and Windows has to be paid for using student fees. By switching to Linux and other open source solutions the TCO for the computing infrastructure would plummet a saving that can be passed on to the students or invested in better or more hardware (such as a greater density of campus WAPs in choke points like Convocation Hall). By institutionally supporting open source solutions, universities save their students money by making open source viable.

As an open source believer, I am frustrated by the fungal infestation of closed, proprietary controls growing in the form of MacBooks across my campus and hope that more efforst can be made by everyone to make open solutions the most viable solutions and leave proprietary software for corporations with piles of money to waste.

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An idea for a possible social networking mashup. This application would be linked into your social network wherein users add it. It keeps track of people’s weekly schedules and media watching habits. When it notices a convergence of a likely desirable media item and a free slot in everyone’s calendar it’ll push everyone a message to their appropriate social network with an “opt-in” request. If enough people opt in it’ll create the event officially and standard reminding mechanisms and calendar penciling occurs automatically.

Based on pre-configuration options, if enough people opt out the event is cancelled.

Obviously access to event listings is a key feature, as is locally dependent search.

If it could plan out whole evenings automatically based on user-data - so that it can generate a list of suggested restaurants based on the preferences of those going and the geographic location of the event/participants.

I know something exists like this for finding mid-point restaurants, but this takes it a step further by pre-populating the type constraints and timing data.

If it could hook into a transit system database to trip plan or automatically phone taxis / calculate fares we’d have something amazing.

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ETech, an annual conference held by O’Reilly Publishing and fronted by the eponymous Tim O’Reilly. Having seen Tim speak and consistently be driven to purchase books that bear his surname - when this man talks I listen. When this man holds a conference, I feel both guilty and poor for not being able to go. This is especially true for ETech, which for many is O’Reilly’s personal rebuke response to TED.

Lawrence Lessig, another man for whom I have plenty of attention span, gave a speech at ETech regarding campaign financing. You can find coverage of his talk at Wired’s epicenter blog covering the conference.

In it, Lessig enunciated a message he has delivered via video on his blog some time earlier. His diagnosis of the core political problem in the United States is the supremacy of the almighty dollar in the political decision making process. The threat of losing precious campaign financing from large corporate interests prevents politicians from taking principled stances and treading into the unknown or unfamiliar debate.

While, sadly, he won’t be running for congress, Lessig declared that he aims to change congress by changing the valuation of options in the decision making process. Lessig aims to fuse democratic political support with funding - wherein public funding propels in the candidate through the campaign rather than private backing.

In a manner similar to the Creative Commons system he founded, Lessig aims to develop an organization aptly called “Change Congress.” It would aribtrate the use of specific campaign badges that candidates can use as examples of transparency to the electorate.  Candidates can get a badge representing their commitment to not accept money from lobbyists or political action committees. Candidates can receive a second badge recognizing they refuse to allow congressional “earmarks” and a third badge by pledging to support public campaign financing.

Change Congress would potentially aid “citizen candidates” to contest front-runners who refuse to rely on public financing - potentially making it more expensive to not play.

Being clear to not paint congress as money-grubbing crooks and liars Lessig emphasized the systematic nature of the problem with this choice quote:

Congress is an encumbancy machine.

Lessig argues that the requirement of money to be a competitive candidate places political leaders in a place of fear, not principle - and fear of the wrong people, corporate leaders and campaign financeers not the plurality of Americans who cast their ballot. Money distorts the process.

I see no reason a future President Obama (or McCain) couldn’t support this, the very notion is giving them momentum.

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One of the greatly under-rated creative thinkers of these past few decades - especially as his creation became buried and sullied by heaps of commercialism, Gary Gygax has left us.

Gygax started what would become a fundamental shift in youth-culture, one that resounds to this day in the now mainsteam world of the console wars.

The man who, with Dave Arneson, made Dungeons and Dragons gave something to us all that profoundly changed entertainment. Fun things were to be interactive, creative even, and that act of creation was the source of fun - not merely the means to it. Players lived in an imaginary place, committing imaginary acts of heroism  - it was almost never committed to paper.

More for others than myself, Gygax defined youth - particularly male youth. He, more than any other figure, is responsible for the creation of an entire profession - game design. The idea that fun could be something designed, that having rules involved made things more fun not less fun is something so fundamental it’s hard to appreciate the shift in thinking D&D brought about.

Roleplaying games, as an entire genre are defined by D&D - it is the gold standard of rule systems to this day, countless of others since. The enduring success of D&D, let alone the explosion of the hobby gaming industry speaks to the power of this mans humble home entertainment.

Having attended Penny Arcade Expo, and been to countless local gaming, comic and sci-fi conventions one can’t deny the pervasiveness of Gygax creation - he holds the same power over the imaginations of nerds everywhere as Tolkein or (I’m sad to say) Rowling.

Many snobs and such will denigrate D&D as quaint derivative schlock made into a board game for pubescent males - and they might be right, but that is something that had never been done right before or better since.

I hope to see a great many industry leaders paying their respects - Blizzard, BioWare, WotC,Bethesda, White Wolf, Square, heck just about the entire gaming industry owes this guy.

It’s hard to think of the 70’s as history - but for an industry that regenerates every seven years - that’s eons ago.

May Pelor smile upon you Gary!

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This is something I think many people, including MBA faculties, fellow internet entrepreneurs and others need to remember. The internet is NOT FOR business, it wasn’t intended to be (ARPANet was for military COMCON) and it still doesn’t represent a significant portion of its use.

“That’s absurd, tonnes of business is conducted over the internet!”

True, much business is conducted USING the internet, but compared to other uses of the internet it represents a tiny fraction.

It’s a cliche now that the internet is for porn, but everyone seems to forget that a tiny TINY fraction of that porn traffic is actually profitable business - the rest is just trafficking of imagery.

Bit torrent certainly isn’t a business - its primary purpose as it stands is to subvert business interests not promote them.

Torrents and pornography (and torrents OF pornography) represent a huge swath of bandwidth consumption.

What about other measures? What do people DO on the internet? I can tell you right now that they don’t spend time surfing Amazon or eBay (both of which have session lengths averaging less than 5 minutes).

It is when I read articles like this one at TechCrunch and then read the follow up commentary that I shake my head with dismay over the vitriol classical business people throw at the web and wonder why they bother with the technology at all.

Moreover, the unabashed jealousy they have of people like Mark Zuckerburg is hard to miss. They breathlessly yammer about how Facebook is just some useless fad that’ll blow over and it’s not a “real” business because it doesn’t make “real money” or whatever. Fact is, Mark Zuckerburg is filthy stinking rich, richer than any of the TechCrunch commentators ever will be I’d wager, so he did something right.

The self-contradictory logic they use is pretty easy to spot as well. They observe that a vast majority of web start-ups have a difficult time constructing monetizing strategies for the services - and resort to inelegant brute-force methods like pay-walls, subscriptions or data-enclosure to make a dime. They see this as the only way that business CAN be conducted because it’s pretty much the only successful way business IS conducted.

Now, I hardly take some ranting semi-coherent blog trolls as representative of the epistemic consensus of the business world - but I don’t think the sentiment is a particularly rare one. The question as identified by some of the wealthiest individuals in the world is, “how do we profit from the prevailing forces of the web and internet?”

Microsoft has figured out pretty fast that it’s faced with an innovator’s dilemma when it comes to openness and it’s making serious alterations to its proprietary strategies. Barriers to exit, so called, are at best a happy fantasy that web companies can live in whilst their customer base is ignorant as to how to escape easily. If barriers to exit exist, sufficiently large groups of dedicated people will tear down in seconds.

Business’ can’t bait and switch their customers, they can’t convince them to adopt a product and then punish them for wanting to leave - if that were two people that would be an abusive relationship.

Businesses must CONSTANTLY reinforce to their customers the value of using THEIR services.  The value is compared across ALL similar products - since they are all free.

The fact that start-ups can still compete in a market space where undercutting is impossible just goes to show how out of touch the established players are with what consumers value.

Innovate or die is become a brutal truth more and more.

You will retain customers by innovating and empowering your users to take advantage of these innovations through teaching and listening to them in a way that reminds you both that you are indeed human people.

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